Virtual servers may be used to make more efficient use of physical servers. Physical servers may be added into a virtual frame data repository in order to be managed by a virtual frame management system. The physical servers have many attributes, and in a large environment, it becomes tedious and error-prone to enter these details manually. Additionally, once assets are added, it is important to be able to locate the equipment as well as correlate the added equipment with interconnected equipment to enable the assessment of changes to equipment. For example, if a system administrator knows that server A is connected to switch B then the system administrator can determine that bringing switch B down for maintenance will have an effect on service provided by server A.
Some existing systems, such as Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) either provide information or the ability to derive information about which switch port a physical server interface is connected to. Some existing switches provide information on what MAC addresses are visible from a switch port. Also, it is common for some switches to provide SNMP traps on linkUp and linkDown events.
However, not all switches provide this information. Furthermore, conventional systems fail to correlate virtual servers with physical servers and their corresponding physical connections.